Tag Archives: Executive Privilege

Meyer and Berenbaum analyze the national security policy challenge in balancing protections for Intelligence Community whistleblowers and the government’s legitimate need for secrecy in order to execute the federal intelligence and counterintelligence mission. It is that need for secrecy that creates the intellectual distance between the sovereign’s requirement for information regarding the performance of the federal intelligence and counterintelligence mission and the ability to conduct that mission.

David Cole, expanding on his recent piece in The New York Review of Books, considers the perpetrators of the major intelligence leaks currently dominating the headlines: Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange. Cole reviews the actions and avowed motivations of these individuals—noting their similarities and differences—while subjecting each situation to legal analysis. Cole acknowledges the complex justifications on all sides, ultimately drawing out complicated questions of civic responsibility on the part of leakers and American society.

To find a joint way to draw down the American troops in the war zone, Congress and the President may seek congressional mechanisms to resolve their differences with interactive processes. Then, constitutional issues arise as to whether a congressional mechanism may use a legislative veto – authorization for a drawdown with a reservation of power for a vote by the two Houses of Congress so as to let the President draw down troop levels while reserving congressional power to stop that draw down. These issues illuminate war powers in the abstract; the issues also apply concretely to the main war of the 2010s, namely, the long war in Afghanistan.

Law Enforcement as a Counterterrorism ToolIn January 2011, Congress enacted legislation prohibiting the use offederal funds to transfer to the United States any individuals currentlydetained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Among ...3,748 views | by David S. Kris | posted on 06/26/2011